


spiral galaxy

by dragonlisette



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, Aromantic, Asexuality, Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-11
Updated: 2014-12-11
Packaged: 2018-12-03 21:22:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11540679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dragonlisette/pseuds/dragonlisette
Summary: Because everyone is obsessed with the spiral tattoos on their wrists, with watching the ink light up with all the colors of the spectrum. Because the media sells love stories like drugs. Because everyone in the world is obsessed with an emotion Dan can’t feel.





	spiral galaxy

**Author's Note:**

> [originally posted on tumblr.](http://cityofphanchester.tumblr.com/post/104982493450/spiral-galaxy)
> 
> 2017 author's note: see the end notes if this is likely to hit close to home. i wish i could talk to the version of me who wrote this fic, because she'd id'd as aromantic for less than a year and wasn't terribly happy. if you're anywhere on the ace or aro spectrums, i love you very very much, you're the last thing from broken, come talk to me on tumblr at cityofphanchester.
> 
> on a happier note, TheMeekOne did the loveliest best [podfic](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5122757) for this fic!!

The rain was lashing the windows like it wanted to punch through. In Dan’s opinion, an onslaught of cold water and harsh wind would have improved the atmosphere of the airport dramatically. The recycled air was stagnant and bored to match the flat expressions and the gray walls. Pale eyes in pale faces watched phone batteries dwindle, watched the time click forward endlessly. It was two in the morning. The arrivals boards and schedules kept apologetically going red. Delayed. Delayed. Delayed. Inclement Weather.

Lightning cracked down not far off; thunder roared; the rain kept slamming into the huge glass panes.

Inclement Weather.

Dan wished for the thousandth time that he was in those clouds, a thin sheet of metal between him and the raging storm. He’d been here a week. God, it was too long. He desperately needed to be up in the air, and he wouldn’t have exactly objected to meeting the ground again a little faster than intended. He needed to get out.

“But  _when_ , Daddy?” a girl asked nearby. Dan pulled his eyes away from the floor to look over. She was twelve or so, blonde, her American accent strong enough to be obnoxious. At first Dan thought she was talking about her flight and felt a twinge of sympathy, but then he saw her rubbing at her wrist, iPhone dropped on her lap, and he looked away quickly, fumbling for his headphones.

“It could be any time, sweetie.” her father said in a tone that indicated he’d said the same words many times.

“I  _know_.” she spat, and Dan was looking at them even though he didn’t want to. The girl picked up her phone, brandishing an Instagram feed like a weapon. “But  _look_. Brittany just – ”

Dan shoved his headphones over his ears and turned the volume up until he couldn’t hear them, staring back at the ground. Fucking Brittany. Not that it was particularly her fault.

He put his phone to sleep, but not before seeing that it was two-fifteen. The storm wasn’t going to let up, it was pointless to wait here, but he didn’t have anywhere else to go. Nothing tied him here, and he wasn’t going to let anything. He pulled the sleeves of his jumper down over his hands. Tuned out everything, even the song blaring in his ears. Eventually the girl and the father moved off, and he turned off the music with some relief. No one was looking at him. Everything was fine.

Everything was fine until someone sat down beside him. Dan stared at the ground, refusing to acknowledge their existence even to himself, tapping his fingers on his knee erratically. Thunder crackled again. He needed to get out. He needed the height, the separation. Don’t get attached. Don’t get tied down. Don’t let anyone put a name to your face, a personality to your name. Don’t ever let emotion color someone’s words when they speak to you, about you. Because any of them might be the spiral inked on Dan’s wrist, and the second they became that was the second everything would fall apart.

“Hello,” the person said in a sweet Northern accent, and Dan looked up because he was tired of L.A. accents and he missed home even if he didn’t admit it.

“Hey,” he said, a beat too late, fear curling in his stomach. He didn’t want to talk, but the person was smiling, all blue eyes and black fringe and he looked vaguely familiar, which terrified Dan even more. Don’t let anyone’s face become familiar.

“I’m Phil.” the stranger said, polite, and Dan tried to smile.

“Dan.” he said. “Hello.” That had already been said. He was a bit rusty on the polite conversation thing. Then something clicked, and he narrowed his eyes, looking past the shorter hair and older face and black-framed glasses to those blue eyes.

You could go swimming in those eyes.

“You’re AmazingPhil off of Youtube.” Dan said, blinking twice. “Aren’t you?”

He laughed, looking surprised. “I – yeah. Sorry. No one’s – I haven’t made videos in almost four years.”

“Yeah.” Dan said, awkward again. “Yeah, I used to watch you. Obviously. Why’d you stop?”

“Not a viable career option, really.” Phil said, shrugging. “I know some people got famous, but my stuff never got that far off the ground. I’ve got a real job now. You know. Boring and soulless. At least I get to travel. Why’re you here?” He looked genuinely curious, but walls were crashing down inside Dan’s head.  _No one can know anything about you. Don’t let anyone put a name to your face, a personality to your name._

Dan shrugged. “It’s a place. To be.” and it was accidentally the most honest answer he’d ever given.

Phil cocked his head, rubbing the spiral on his wrist in that absentminded way that normal people had. It was inked in black, and it made this a hundred times more dangerous, a thousand times, and Dan wanted to run but he didn’t and he wasn’t sure why. He’d run out of safer situations before.

“You just came here as a place to exist?” Phil asked, and he looked a little bit confused but not offput. Dan wondered why.

“Yes.” he said simply.

“Why?”

There was a pause, because there were two answers that Dan could have given.

_Because I’m traveling the world. A free spirit who dropped out of uni to end up in LAX watching a storm I’d’ve never gotten to see if I hadn’t come here today._

_Because everyone is obsessed with the spiral tattoos on their wrists, with finding their soulmate, with watching the ink light up with all the colors of the spectrum, with living a happily ever after with the person they irrevocably adore. Because the media sells love stories like drugs, every newscast about celebrities finding their soulmate in the common rabble, every television drama about searching for The One, finding them, living happily with them. Because everyone in the world is obsessed with an emotion I can’t feel. Because I’ve become obsessed with never letting the person doomed to be my soulmate know anything about me, because it’s better for them to not know that they’re chained to a broken soul, because everything just leads to pain and I want to stay alone so I only hurt myself and not anyone else._

“Dan?”

Dan breathed and put on a fake smile and told the lie. “I travel the world.”

“That’s amazing.” Phil said, and a crackly announcement came through the speakers of things you weren’t allowed to do, and yes, everything is still delayed even more because of Inclement Weather.

The storm rolled on through the early hours of the morning, the airport dead and dying around them. Mostly it was just the two of them, a pair of gloomy twenty-somethings slumped tiredly on uncomfortable chairs. It wasn’t so bad talking to Phil, Dan decided around three-thirty in the morning. He was easy to talk to, enthusiastic about everything even when both of their speech was slow and slurring and punctuated with huge yawns. Dan didn’t really know what was going to happen, why they were still there if the flights clearly weren’t coming, what would happen to the tickets, what flight he would end up on and when, where Phil was going anyway, but he couldn’t really bring himself to care.

His phone died around four, and he dug out his charger, grumbling an explanation to Phil, who nodded sleepily. The only benefit to stormy-weather airports, Dan decided, was that there was a free plug under ten feet off. It was while he was sitting on the floor in front of it, waiting for the glowing Apple logo to pop up, that he absently touched his wrist.

It hurt.

His left wrist hurt.

It took him a second, and then everything smashed into place into his head, fear tearing through his lungs like a raging beast, ripping at his insides and tearing everything apart. He was light-headed with it, dizzy with the inevitability of what he’d done. Somehow, somehow, he’d tried so hard, but somehow it’d had happened anyway. “Sorry,” he said, choking out the syllables, setting his phone down on the floor beneath the plug, stumbling to his feet. “Sorry, just – just a second,” and he left, because he was good at leaving, even if this time it was too late.

He ducked down a hall, short, dimly-lit, lined with doors, and sat against the wall, his hands shaking so badly he couldn’t even brush his hair out of his eyes. He stared at his wrist, the stretched-out sleeve of his jumper pulled up over his hand, and he didn’t want to pull his sleeve down. He had to. Shaking hands and pounding heart. Panicked tears starting up behind his eyes. He’d never been good at being brave, had he? A coward, a running fleeing coward, but at least he’d seen the world.

He jerked his left sleeve down, fast, like ripping off a bandage, all the way down to his elbow, and there was no surprise in seeing the ink seeping under his skin. Colors. So many colors. He’d seen pictures of it so many times, but it was still so odd seeing it on his own wrist. He was used to the thick black ink of the two-armed spiral tattoo, dark over the pale-blue veins spiderwebbing under the thin skin. But it was fading, blues and golds and purples and greens bleeding in over it, and that was new. He turned his wrist back and forth under the dim light, watching the tendons and veins and shadows shift, the image warp.

The pain was searing, so much so that he hissed, rubbing at his wrist. It hurt more than he had thought it would. Love was pain, he supposed, love was pain. It felt like a fire, moving under his skin, burning the color in, cauterizing the old Dan out and welcoming the new one in with unwanted fireworks. He swore, partly because it hurt, but mostly because no matter what he did now, it wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair to leave Phil, lovely fated stranger, in a mess of confusion and hurt and lost chances in an airport far from home. But it wasn’t fair to stay, either, to toss all his brokenness and bitterness and imperfection at that stranger, not when everyone in the world had been waiting their whole life for the colors to light up, because those colors meant perfect love, didn’t they? Not Dan’s fucked-up version of love, by which he meant not feeling it. He swore again, rubbing harshly at the watercolors painting themselves in. Didn’t have the guts to either stay or run, so he just sat against the wall and waited. It only took a minute.

“Dan?” Sweet Northern accent.

Dan just nodded, absently pulling his jumper sleeve back down over his hand. It didn’t really matter. Phil would have seen anyway.

“Are you all right? Sorry, I got worried.”

“ ‘m okay.” he said, thinking it would probably have been rude to just nod again. He smiled up at him, fake and forced. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have run off.”

“D’you mind if I stay?” He sounded uncertain, insecure, scared.

Dan just nodded, and Phil sat cross-legged in the middle of the hallway, not making eye contact. His right hand and forearm were pressed against his side. Dan couldn’t see the spiral he knew was there. That was probably the point.

The silence dragged on. Dan had never broken a silence in his life: He built them, expertly crafted them from walls upon walls and things never said. His psyche was the Constantinople of emotional blockades. He wasn’t sure he knew how to break a silence, but he didn’t have the chance, because Phil took it first.

“Dan? What’s wrong? Why’d you run off?”

“ ‘s what I’m good at.” Dan said, too tired at four AM to lie. Phil was slipping through the walls of his city far too easily, but he wasn’t really surprised by it. He just let it go, waited for the rest of the inevitable.

“Would you mind – if – Dan, you know what I’m going to say.”

“Yeah.” Dan said. “I’d mind a lot, but go for it.”

“Really?”

Dan nodded tiredly. “Gonna have to deal with it eventually.”

Phil extended his right arm, the colors shimmering under his wrist. Bright and cosmic in the dim hallway. Dan’s heart was in his throat, but he reached out too, pulling back his sleeve, the colors in his skin paler, incomplete, but brightening with every pulse of blood to his wrist.

“You’re left handed.” Phil said, interested. Dan snorted a laugh at how irrelevant it was.

“Yep. Along with my many other flaws.”

Phil shook his head, but stayed silent for a minute. “Tell me something about you. If you’re really – y’know, my…” He trailed off before he could hit the word,  _soulmate_ , so new and so dangerous. “Just, I don’t know anything about you.”

“I’m not interesting.” said Dan, because he was trying to think of a way to break it to Phil. It was impossible to bring up, unfair not to. “Listen – um – ”

“Yeah?”

He opened his mouth. Closed it again. It was impossible to say, impossible to summon from his throat. He was scared,  _scaredscaredscared_ , this was the beginning of the end. “I think – not – not that – Phil, it’s a mistake, it has to be, I’ve never – I’ve never been attracted to anyone, ever, ever, ever – I don’t  _work_  like that – I can’t be someone’s soulmate – and I, I don’t know, I’m sorry, this is so unfair to you.” He laughed bitterly, closing his eyes so he wouldn’t have to see Phil’s face, and banged his head softly back against the wall. Once. Twice. Three times.

“Dan, stop.” Dan stopped and opened his eyes, squinting at Phil’s face. Almost expressionless in how it was hiding both relief and nerves at the same time. Phil opened his mouth, and Dan, petrified but glad he wasn’t going to have to say it himself, knew Phil was going to. “Asexual?”

“Step further.”

“Aromantic.”

“Got it in two.”

Silence for a while. When Phil spoke again, his voice was slow, but he sounded happier. “Dan, it’s not an issue. Like, we’ve got plenty of other problems to deal with without worrying about that. Like the fact we’re in LAX at five in the morning and the fact we’re complete strangers.”

“What do you  _mean_ , it’s not an issue?” Dan said, anger bursting out because how could Phil  _say_  that, of course it was a problem, it had been the black hole in Dan’s life for as long as he could remember. “I’m  _broken_ , it’s an _issue_.”

“I – you’re not  _broken_.” Phil said, and it made Dan feel sickeningly better that there was a questioning upturn at the end of the phrase, that Phil looked uncertain, scared at his outburst.

“Look at the world we live in.” Dan said, steady, clipped, because he knew what he was going to say, it was a speech he had planned out and rehearsed night after night after night in the dark since he was young. “Look at it. It’s completely intoxicated on romantic love. On soulmates. On perfect matches. Yeah, sure, the system eliminates bias. Yeah, sure, no one cares if you’re gay anymore. But it’s  _obsessed_  with  _being in love_. And I’m not in love, and I’m never going to be in love with you, and both of us have been told since we were little that we were going to grow up and meet our soulmate and live in adoration forever. And it’s not going to happen. And I’m sorry,  _Jesus_ , I’m fucking sorry, but I can’t do a single goddamn thing about it. Believe me, I’ve tried. I’ve tried to feel something for people, and it doesn’t work, and then I drop out of uni just to run away because I was just praying to God I’d never find you, because all I’m going to do now is hurt you.”

Silence again, and Dan closed his eyes, hiding the hot tears starting to well up. It wasn’t  _fair_. He started to pull his arm back, but cold fingers caught at his wrist. “Dan, I don’t care.”

Dan opened his eyes. Angrily swiped at the dampness on his cheeks.

“I don’t care.” Phil said again, even though he looked close to tears too. “We can be as platonic as you want, I just don’t want you to leave before I even know you.”

“What?” Dan asked, even though he’d heard perfectly. Phil had grabbed his wrist with his right hand, and slowly, without making eye contact, Dan carefully disentangled himself and turned Phil’s hand over so it lay palm-up in Dan’s left. Shining galaxy spirals a few inches apart, Dan’s left wrist and Phil’s right.

“We can be as platonic as you want,” Phil said slowly, “I just don’t want you to leave before I even know you.”

“But we’re meant to be soulmates.” Dan said weakly.

“Yeah, we are soulmates. That doesn’t mean we have to be boyfriends.”

“Then what  _are_  we?” Dan asked, tearing his eyes away from their wrists and meeting Phil’s eyes for once. “I kind of like labels.”

Phil giggled, and his eyes were bright. “Platonic soulmates who just have to get to know each other.”

“I thought you’d be more upset.” Dan said, a half smile crawling onto his face. “Um, okay.”

“I don’t really blame you, but I think you worried too much. Not that it helps now, but didn’t you think – y’know, if your soulmate cared about it, they wouldn’t be paired with you, they wouldn’t be your soulmate.”

“Didn’t think about it.” Dan said, still smiling a little. Confused. Hopeful. “I’m sorry I ran away from you for literally years. Don’t take it personally.” He stopped, thinking, because relief and happiness were starting to wash at him, because somehow this thing he’d been dreading for his entire life was going all right. He smiled after a second. Proper smiled. Because he couldn’t help it.

“I like you,” Phil said thoughtfully, after a moment. “Like your smile.”

“I like you too.” Dan said, because he was too tired to have a filter. “You’re pretty. By which I mean, you know, aesthetically pleasing or whatever. I like looking at your face.” He yawned, taking his hand back to cover his mouth. “It’s so late.”

“Early.” Phil said, stifling a yawn triggered by Dan’s. “You’re prettier. By which I mean whatever I want without making you uncomfortable or something. Wanna sleep.”

“Okay,” Dan said, because he wasn’t sure what else to say.

And when Dan woke up to rainwashed sunlight and booming announcements about rescheduled flights, woke up curled in an uncomfortable airport chair with his head somehow nestled on Phil’s shoulder, he still didn’t know exactly what to think, but it seemed all right somehow.

**Author's Note:**

> it's ultimately a positive story, but dan sees and describes himself as broken and has for a long time. this is understandable given the context of an au where romantic soulmate love is even more of a focus than it is here. it's not that the story views dan that way, it's that i chose to write a story where he views himself that way. avoid if this bothers you! keep an eye out for happier aro content, i definitely want to write it.


End file.
